Small victory

I am very pleased with myself. My afternoon schedule yesterday was out of whack because I had an eye doctor’s appointment that threw me out of my routine. After work I was off to my first T’ai Chi class and I’d expected to just go from work and not have time to dilly dally around. But going from the clinic instead, I had not enough time to go home but too much time to go right to the center.

Free time = time to find something to eat.

I wasn’t really all that hungry, having had a big salad at lunch with all kinds of interesting flavors and textures. And I’d already calculated out what I was going to have for dinner when I got home and I had no extra points available for the day, though were some left in the weekly flex allowance. Since I ate so many of those on one box of WW treats on Sunday, though, I am trying to just stay within my daily points to compensate.

However, Starbucks was on the corner. I was cold, they have hot things. With nibbles to go with them. I was comfortable getting a tall non-fat chai latte, having done that before and figuring out how I could adjust food so I could account for it. My eye then fell on the little packets of chocolate covered cookies right at the register. Clearly they are there so people like me can impulse-buy them, snarf them down, and then hit themselves in the head and say, “what possessed me?”

I bought one package of two milk-chocolate covered graham crackers and promptly bit into one. It was divine. Chocolatey, rich tasting, yummy. But I was getting nervous about the idea of eating two. “I’ll save the second one until after class,” I said to myself virtuously. Ha ha ha. That was not a likely story. Then I had the presence of mind to pull out the package and look at the label. I know, it’s a novel concept.

The serving size was not the whole package of two crackers, it was ONE cracker at 140 calories and 7 gms of fat each. Even on the fly I could calculate that as at least 3 points, and as much as I liked one of them, I could not justify eating two. It wouldn’t taste any better and would just suck me into a pit of “oh well, what’s the difference now?” So I threw that perfectly good yummy milk chocolate covered graham cracker away and walked purposefully to T’ai Chi. Yayyyy me!

In the scheme of things, this was a small small food decision. But it was surprisingly hard to make. Eat a whole pizza? nope, not gonna do it. Eat a big serving of brownies a la mode? nope, not gonna do it. Eat two chocolate covered cookies? That is a lot harder. If I hadn’t looked at the package and verified the serving size and the nutritional value, I might have just mindlessly eaten it, nibble by nibble, and probably have forgotten to record it. Instead, I tossed the cookie, kept the wrapper, and recorded it in my journal when I got home. I ate cereal for dinner to compensate but I was okay with it – I stayed within my points 🙂